The Real Author Behind Randolph Robban's 1950 alternate history, Si l'Allemagne avait vaincu (If Germany Had Won).

From the department of "better late than never":

Today, I'm happy to offer a correction to a mistaken claim I made in my 2005 book, The World Hitler Never Made, about the pioneering postwar alternate history by Randolph Robban, Si l'Allemagne avait vaincu (If Germany Had Won).

When I originally wrote the book, I was well aware (and, in fact, noted) that "Robban" was the pen-name of an anonymous Hungarian writer.  But I mistakenly assumed, based on an autobiographical blurb by the novel's fictional narrator describing himself as a French-based Hungarian diplomat, that Robban himself was in the same line of work.  (I said he was a "former diplomat").

Today, however, in doing some online research, I learned who Robban really was -- namely, the Hungarian journalist and writer Miklós Ajtay.  See his Wikipedia page HERE.

So to set the record straight, I'm pasting below the original paragraphs from my book, in which I analyze Robban's novel, which was one of the first postwar alternate histories on the topic of the Nazis winning World War II.  I've added a correction highlighted in YELLOW.  Anyone quoting the book from now on should use this corrected version.

Original paragraphs from THE WORLD HITLER NEVER MADE, pp. 187-90.

"One of the most interesting of these alternate histories was Si l'Allemagne avait vaincu.  Published in 1950 by an anonymous Hungarian author writing under the pseudonym, Randolph Robban, the novel is narrated from the perspective of an anonymous diplomat from the fictional Eastern European nation of Sycambria, who is posted in France when the Second World War comes to an abrupt end.  In the novel’s point of divergence, Germany ends up snatching victory from the jaws of defeat at the last minute in January of 1945, when it uses its newly developed atomic bombs to obliterate London and Chicago and force unconditional surrender.  From this point on, Germany imposes a postwar order upon Europe and the U.S. that is the mirror image of the real historical order imposed upon Germany by the Allies.  After occupying the United States, Germany enforces a strict policy of reeducation upon the defeated nation in order to Nazify its population and make it compliant with its new masters. The Germans further decide to punish their wartime foes by fashioning the new legal principle of “crimes against humanity,” which they employ at the high-profile war crimes trial held in Nuremberg.  Before long however, Germany adopts a more lenient course of action towards the U.S.  Growing tensions between Germany and Japan over the nature of the postwar order leads Hitler to rearm the U.S. with the intent of using the country as a potential bulwark against the Japanese.  By the novel’s end, a conflict over Korea sparks a new war between the former Axis partners, which leads to their mutual nuclear devastation.  In the book’s last lines, the narrator personally experiences the nuking of Berlin and concludes with the grim observation, “I will never again have the strength nor inclination to imagine what would have become of the world if the victors had somehow been transformed into the vanquished and the vanquished transformed into the victors.”  

Si l'Allemagne avait vaincu was exceptional as an early postwar work of alternate history that criticized rather than vindicated the recent past.  While at first glance, Robban’s novel resembled contemporaneous Anglo-American works by painting a grim portrait of a Nazi military victory, its thinly-veiled ironic tone revealed that its true target was not the vanquished Germans but the victorious Allies.   By positing that the Nazis would have behaved more or less like the Allies had they won the war, Robban critiqued the real historical postwar order imposed by the Allies upon Europe.  When the Sycambrian narrator condemns the Nazis’ war crimes trials of the Allies at Nuremberg for their retroactive legal character as well for the Nazi government’s hypocritical failure to regard its own wartime conduct as criminal, he clearly voiced Robban’s own disapproval of the Allied Nuremberg Trials.   And when the narrator condemns the Nazis’ postwar exploitation of Sycambrian and other nations’ prisoners of war as forced laborers, he expressed Robban’s own criticism of Stalin’s similar behavior after 1945.   Finally, the narrator’s depiction of the American people’s willingness to accommodate themselves to the new totalitarian order imposed upon them by the Germans reflected Robban’s cynical belief in the shallowness of American democracy and expressed his opposition to the central role that the U.S. was playing in the reconstruction of postwar Europe.  

In essence, the anonymous narrator in Si l'Allemagne avait vaincu was a fictional version of Robban’s own pseudonymous self.  This becomes clear near the end of the novel, when the narrator reveals his decision, in the midst of a Nazi-ruled world, to write an alternate history novel entitled, And If They Had Won?, outlining what would have happened if the Allies had triumphed in the Second World War.  In undertaking this project, the narrator takes the advice of colleagues who advise him not to use his own name, for fear he will suffer recriminations from the victorious authorities who will perceive his fictional scenario as a bitter satire on the present.   In summarizing what he believed would have happened, the narrator in his novel essentially outlines a utopian vision of what Robban believed the Allies should have done (but did not do) in setting up the real historical European postwar order.  This vision included refraining from exacting revenge on the Germans, abstaining from a principle of collective guilt, embracing swift economic reconstruction, and fostering reconciliation between collaborators and resisters through a blanket policy of amnesty and forgiveness.    In short, both the narrator’s utopian vision of an Allied victory and his dystopian description of a Nazi triumph, expressed Robban’s pessimistic view towards the recent past. 

In writing Si l'Allemagne avait vaincu, Robban expressed the perspective of a Hungarian writer (and a former diplomat -- [should now be deleted]) whose nation did not benefit in the same way as the Allied nations did from the outcome of the Second World War.   The defeat of Nazism in 1945, after all, allowed Hungary to become swallowed up by Stalin’s bloc of Eastern European communist satellite states.  From a Hungarian perspective, the Allied victory constituted a disaster.  In writing his novel, Robban wanted to alert his largely Western audience to the fact that Nazism’s real historical defeat had brought about terrible unanticipated consequences for Eastern Europe; rather than bringing about liberation, it brought about a new form of oppression. To be sure, by likening the real historical postwar behavior of the Allies to the allohistorical postwar behavior of the Nazis, Robban stretched the bounds of both plausibility and taste to make his broader political point.  Most likely for this reason, his book received little attention in the Anglo-American world. It did however receive praise in Germany, where reviewers eagerly supported its relativistic conclusions.   Despite largely being ignored, however, the novel fulfilled a significant task.  For in using the premise of a Nazi victory to criticize the recent past, Si l'Allemagne avait vaincu served as a foil that further underscored the dominant early postwar trend of Anglo-American writers using alternate history to vindicate the course of real history."